What Is A Full Maintenance Contract (FMC)?

A full maintenance contract is written to allow an elevator service company to take total responsibility for the elevator equipment identified in the maintenance agreement. This contract acts like an insurance policy and allows the manager to budget total yearly costs and eliminate concerns relating to elevator liability and exposure to claims in the event of accidents or injuries. Liability is limited because the maintenance contractor assumes all responsibility and determines the amount of service visits required to keep the elevator system operating safely. Some full maintenance contracts will include after hour charges for trouble calls. There tends to be many variations of this type of contract and they are all referred to as full maintenance contracts, but the elevator owner needs to read the entire contract to see what is excluded.

While many elevator owners believe that they have full maintenance contracts, they need to read over the fine print on the contracts that are provided by some elevator companies. An elevator owner might believe that because they are paying a monthly charge for their elevator maintenance that they will have monthly visits for maintenance on their elevator. Unfortunately that is not true.

Many elevator maintenance companies use the terms systematic, routine, essential, premium, optimum, usage based, regularly scheduled basis, modular, remote monitoring & maintenance schedule specific to your equipment and its usage. Amazingly when these terms are used there is no definitive frequency of maintenance visits. All these terms mean is that the elevator contractor will be out for maintenance at extended intervals that are established by the elevator maintenance company.